1969 04-09 Expos at Mets

Shea Stadium, Sunday Afternoon: A New Franchise Learns the Cost of Big Moments

The seams of a baseball season are often stitched in public, in loops of triumph and mistake that show a club’s character. On a cool, sunlit afternoon at Shea Stadium, the Montreal Expos — still very much an experiment in national reach and roster construction — provided a compact lesson in what it takes to become a major-league franchise: flashes of brilliance, recurring roster questions, and a fan economy for an era when ticket offices, telephone computers, and promotional calendars mattered as much as the scoreboard.

A crowd two days into big-league life

The scene was not Opening Day’s pageant, but the remnant of a civic surge: fewer dignitaries, fewer parades, and a more ordinary crowd rubbing shoulders under a sky in the mid‑sixties. Yet the electricity remained. Radio announcers threaded play-by-play with the local marketing of a franchise that had to sell itself — season tickets, bleacher releases, themed game nights and a centralized phone line powered by TRS computers. That salesmanship was part of a larger narrative: baseball here was both sport and communal ritual, a new attraction asking a region to make it habit.

Players who define a team’s temperament

The game’s texture pivoted on veterans and newcomers. Rusty Staub, already a headline after the Expos’ 11-10 opening victory the prior day, showed his adaptability: a patient approach at the plate, a wide stance found in a search for consistency, and ultimately a mix of timely power and sharp fielding. Maury Wills, whose shortstop heroics in the opening frames included a diving stop and an electric throw, supplied the kind of petite, relentless defense that steadies a developing roster. Between them the game became a study in two contrasting tempos — Wills’ fleet-footed reaction and Staub’s controlled, mechanism-driven offense.

Pitching as a recurring concern

More than once the broadcast returned to a familiar refrain: pitchers were early-season thin. Bill Stoneman, the Expos’ starter, was chased in the first inning after control problems — a demonstration of how spring-training timing can leave arms vulnerable. Jim McAndrew for the Mets also showed signs of rust, a symptom broadcasters blamed on late arrivals and the universal need for pitchers to rebuild their workload. The chain reaction was immediate: relievers called, a bullpen stretched, and managerial calculations exposed. For an expansion club building pitching depth, each inning becomes a ledger entry that matters beyond the final line score.

How ballpark dimensions and split-second hops change a game

Shea’s geometry mattered. A ball slapped down the right-field line could become a double or a souvenir, depending on a hop or how outfielders positioned themselves for a runner who preferred the opposite field. Rusty Staub’s left-center double exploited a gap left by defensive alignment; a later home run leapt over the right-field wall and reminded listeners that batted‑ball angles are as decisive as coaching plans. Field maintenance, turf quirks and unpredictable hops entered the conversation as characters in the drama rather than footnotes.

Broadcasting as cultural time capsule

The radio itself was part of the story: pregame interviews with Staub and catcher John Bateman, PSAs from the March of Dimes and other community appeals punctuated play. Commercial breaks about tickets, promotional days and travel logistics made the broadcast a living archive of the season’s institutional needs — selling a product, building a fanbase, and turning a single contest into a sustained community calendar.

Key moments that bent the game

• First-inning pressure: Stoneman’s early struggles and the Mets’ four-run outburst established a deficit the Expos spent the game erasing.
• Wills’ defense: A diving stop and precise throw erased a likely Met big inning, shifting momentum to Montreal’s side.
• Second-inning rally: The Expos loaded the bases and manufactured three runs through walks, a single, and aggressive baserunning.
• Relief work decides late: Mets relievers, particularly Doug McGraw and later Nolan Ryan, quelled rallies that threatened to tie the score.
• Rusty’s late power: Staub’s eighth-inning home run provided a necessary jolt, turning isolated hits into runs and creating a late‑game narrative of resilience.

A fan economy and a franchise’s early identity

Between innings came logistical reminders: ticket office hours, rushes for bleacher seats, and the use of early computerized systems to allocate tickets rapidly. Those details matter because attendance is the currency of a franchise’s first years. The Expos’ outreach — themed nights, group sales and season-purchase incentives — read like a blueprint for building a permanent home in a nascent market.

Baseball, at this level, is not only scores and statistics. It is a negotiation between circumstance and ambition: weather and turf, rookie nerves and veteran steadiness, promotional schedules and a fanbase still learning to claim its place in the stands. For the Expos, every defensive gem and every bullpen call felt larger than a single game because each became evidence that the team could survive the unpredictability of early top-flight competition.

When the final out fell, the scoreboard read like the result of a teaching day: the Mets 9, the Expos 5. The tally did not erase the flashes of potential — the double plays, the rallies, the reaches for a different stance at the plate — but it did confirm the truth of expansion baseball: building a major-league identity takes weeks of games and a thousand small adjustments.

That process — of adaptation, remedy, and occasional triumph — is what will ultimately seat a team in the hearts of a city as surely as it wins games on the field.